Google TrueView In-Stream Takes AdWords for Video Mobile

Yesterday, on the Google Mobile Ads blog, Phil Farhi, group product manager at YouTube, announced that TrueView in-stream video ads have expanded their reach to mobile devices. TrueView in-stream videos can appear on YouTube Videos (Watch pages on YouTube), on video publisher pages in the Google Display Network (includes YouTube), and on video publisher pages outside the network.

TrueView advertisers are only charged when the video ad is seen through to completion or hits the 30-second mark if it’s a longer ad. The ads are skippable after five seconds. Google says this option allows for better engaged viewers who only watch the ads they want to and interaction rates are higher.

Since brand awareness was found to rise 24% and engagement rose 17% when ad campaigns span multiple screens: TV, phone, PC and tablet, getting a campaign to those screens should be vital to your campaign’s success.

With TrueView and AdWords for Video you can now reach three of those screens. Four if you consider the rise of connected TV options which allows viewers to watch YouTube videos on their TVs.

TrueView is quite successful for Google, according to their internal tracking. As of late last year it he percentage of viewers who choose to watch an advertiser’s message was holding steady at 15-45 percent. They also say that, on average, TrueView in-stream ads reduce audience drop-off by 40 percent when compared to regular pre-roll ads.

It’s now easier than ever before to get your campaign out across multiple screens as an advertiser. As a content producer on YouTube, it also means you could see an uptick in your revenue from the mobile platform as these ads start to get implemented. YouTube did say that they were still testing the ads on mobile but it looks good so far. I have been doing some minor testing of my own this morning and have yet to see the TrueView skippable ads on any YouTube videos I was checking out with my iPad. In fact I couldn’t even get any on my Android phone either. It seems they must still be doing the roll out. I did see ads, but they weren’t skippable, so I abandoned the videos. If they had been skippable, I wouldn’t have abandoned them. So that means no one got a view and no ads were seen nor paid for. Hence why the skippability of the TrueView ads is so cool. At least the video content would have been seen in my testing.

For all the information on getting started with TrueView and Adwords for Video, head over to the AdWords help pages.

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